Sinai...continued

To wrap up the Sinai trip...

There is a mosque and a church on the top of Mount Sinai, neither of which are usually open to visitors. In a small pit next to the mosque is a little niche where Moses is said to have waited for God to give him the 10 Commandments. I completely understood why he chose such a place to wait...the top of Mount Sinai is windy! By the time the sun set, we were huddled next to the church trying to keep warm. The Bedouin rent blankets and sell warm drinks and food at small stands below the summit, so we had some hot chocolate and cookies before we came down by way of the easier camel trail.

The mosque at the summit of Jebel Musa.

The church.

Annette and I found a little hole filled with blankets just below the summit. It smelled like camels, but was a good 20 degrees warmer than outside, so we hung out in there for a bit. I think it's a place where Bedouin or visitors can spend the night on the mountain; many people do this in order to see the sunrise, and many of the Bedouin spend a few days at a time on the mountain to work the food and blanket stands. Next time I go (inshallah!), I will sleep on the mountain; the stars are so bright because there aren't any cities nearby, and it's quiet except for the wind.

The other extreme: after freezing on Mount Sinai, we took our shared minibus back to Dahab and found a hotel with a pool and rooms with balconies for 35 LE/night, or about $12 total for two nights. Actually, our whole trip--food, guides, transportation, snorkelling, hotel, shopping--cost about $120 each. We did get better prices than most tourists would, because we're students, we speak some Arabic, and we travelled independently during the off-season, but still...Egypt is a great place to do a lot with just a little bit of money.

Here's the beach at the Blue Hole in Dahab. I wish I had had an underwater camera, because the coral reef is beautiful. The reef begins just a couple meters from the shore, so you just walk out and put your head under the water (with a snorkel mask, because it's one of the saltiest seas in the world), and there it is. The water looks so normal from the surface, but underneath is shockingly colorful. There are, of course, all the major Finding Nemo representatives, but my favorite was a rainbow-colored fish that was so beautiful that I stalked it as it swam around the reef.

The desert starts where the beach ends. If you look east, you see people lounging in bikinis and blue water and divers walking around in wetsuits; if you turn around and look west, you see camels and Bedouin and bare, rugged mountains.

The view behind our hotel. While the fresh, white balconies and pools and gardens at the Dahab hotels are nice to look at, the more run-down parts of the town have a lot of character (this goes for Cairo, too).

The next day, Enab, the man who drove us to Blue Hole, took us into the mountains to an oasis. (odd story that feels like deja-vu from the pyramids, where we saw a horse and rider fall off a drop-off: on the way to the oasis, a minibus like the one we took to Saint Catherine's took a curve too fast and plunged into a big ditch. It landed upside-down; luckily, only the driver was inside, and he wasn't horribly injured. Enab and some other men helped him climb out of the ditch).

The oasis looked just like the Great Valley from Land Before Time...but no tree-stars.

After the oasis, we threw our stuff in our bags and caught the bus for the 8-hour trek back to Cairo. We fully intend to return to Dahab before we leave Egypt.